Genii Weblog

Leave aside the question of who would be a better President, who would be a stronger leader, who would have policies that would help or hurt or whatever...

Imagine various candidates over the years magically handed a half-hour opportunity, six days before an election, to share their vision, uninterrupted and with full production values, to the entire country.

Now imagine if John McCain had been handed this opportunity yesterday, no strings attached, with the production team, the money to produce it, all his current advisors available to help him create it. Imagine John McCain given free reign to paint any picture he wanted, create the ultimate "game changer", put his vision in front of the American people. Again, leave aside the question of who would be a better President, etc. No matter what your political beliefs, just imagine that half hour. Then go look at the polls and see if they make sense to you.

Another day, another Two Minute Demo, this time showing how CoexEdit 2.1 uses shared toolbars in web editing when using our customized FCKeditor 2.6.3. These tool bars allow you far greater control over the UI of the web editing session, and allow you to conserve space when using multiple rich text fields.

Time for another Two Minute Demo, this time showing "wiki links" in both the Notes client and the web browser. For our purposes, a wiki link is a link to either an existing document or a document which we might want to create. All that it takes is putting the name of the document (usually the Subject, but any field will work) in double parentheses, like ((Some document)). When saved, this will become a link hotspot to that document. If the document does not exist, the link will become an action hotspot to create the document. Wiki links have proven to be very popular and powerful, as they allow the content provider to add links without menu commands. To further facilitate that, CoexEdit also offers quick link shortcuts as part of the wiki link logic, so ((http://www.ibm.com|IBM)) becomes IBM. Watch the final slide in the demo for a few other options.

My wife and I went down to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections to vote. It was quite exciting. A couple of blocks before we got there, there were signs for overflow parking for the Board of Elections, so we went into a parking garage and had to circle a couple of times to find a space because that parking lot, and every other overflow lot from what I can tell, was packed. We were about worried about how long the lines might be, but the polling area was a masterpiece of efficiency with about 100 polling stations and people there to help through each step. We were probably there about an hour total, but given the incredible number of people voting, I think we got off lucky.

I find it a thrill to vote every election, but I do feel especially enthusiastic this year. I have never voted early before, but I am glad I did, as I am now free to work at a polling station on Election Day.

Back in February, we announced that all product pricing for Genii Software products would be shown in three currencies, the U.S. Dollar, the Euro and the British Pound. Yesterday, we went back to U.S. Dollar pricing and put "Call for quote" under all the euro and British pound pricing. The fluctuations in the currencies in recent weeks have made it impossible to keep up and provide fair and stable pricing. We could have chosen either fair or stable, but not both. We hope to get back to posted prices in all three currencies, but world events may make this difficult for a while. Of course, we are still happy to extend an official quote in any of the three currencies, or most other currencies, for that matter.

CoexEdit Version 2.1 is ready for release, and it is a doozy. While I am still polishing up the documentation and adding voice-overs on some of the "two minute videos", I thought I'd post the feature list so you all know why I think it has been worth the wait.

Features in CoexEdit 2.1 (some features released to specific customers earlier):

Integration of FCKeditor 2.6.3

Improved support for "accessible tables"

Support for shared toolbars in FCKeditor

Editor-in-database now fully supported

Enhanced "wiki links" functionality

Enhanced memory management

Improved attachment icon handling

More robust exception handling

Enhanced support for anchor links

Better recognition of default CSS styles

Supports IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and Camino browsers

Along with all the small tidy-ups and bug-fixes and such that come along with every new version, this is quite a big set of features for a "minor" version, but the CoexEdit community has grown and grown, and with it the support and feature requests have grown and grown as well. We have been listening and incorporating this excellent feedback, and should really have a version that will suit the masses. So, come and get it (and keep up all the great feedback so Version 2.2 can be just as exciting)!

Update #1: Click on the image below to view the way we customized FCKeditor to allow you to set column and row headers on a table, and how the changes are reflected in the Notes client as well, thus supporting screen readers in both Notes and in web browsers.